It's… fine? Unlike certain other brands, I've encountered no network of frothing, territorial, gatekeeping dealers with Beckhoff. For my project, I reached out to sales.usa@beckhoff.com, got a rep, asked for a quote, and went from there.
Secondhand can be viable too. Some of my "jellybean" EtherCAT terminals came from eBay. I won't get help from Beckhoff if they break, but given that I already have replacements on hand, I'm really not worried about it.
Beckhoff also lets you download almost all the development tools, runtimes, and PLC libraries without paying. In their words:
> Trial licenses can be generated in the TwinCAT 3 development environment (XAE) for many TwinCAT 3 functions for a validity period of 7 days. This can be repeated any number of times. An internet connection is not required for this. In this way, these TwinCAT functions can be used simply and cost-effectively in laboratory operations, e.g. in the education sector.
This is obviously useful for development and experimentation. It can also be an escape hatch in production if you need to substitute controllers. Beckhoff wants you to pay for what you use, sure, but their licensing scheme goes out of its way to avoid kicking you when you're down.
> Unlike certain other brands, I've encountered no network of frothing, territorial, gatekeeping dealers with Beckhoff.
This. They sell you gear then leave you alone. If you need help you call or email. Done. If the vendor demands you create an account to access simple datasheets - run like hell. Once they see you even glancing at a product they activate a frothing at the mouth sales rep who will launch a harassment campaign where they email and call multiple times a week seemingly forever or until you are EXTERMELY rude to them.
Sure, call. Do a back and forth with calls and emails for two days with their sales guy to make sure they got it right. Spending five to six figures. 5-15% of order shows up incorrect.
When you go to try another distributor: No, you're in crappy vendor's territory. So, sorry!
Waiting for that invisible hand of the free market to step in...
As i just posted, in this case, all you have to do is paste the part numbe rinto octopart and you would discover there are 5 no-questions-asked distributors that will sell you it without any issue.
I guess I'm fortunate enough to have never had any issues with the local yokels and haven't run into anybody with any distributor horror stories. Save Keyence, of course, but at least their salespeople are so desperate for sales that the salesman you have at any given time will usually let you walk all over them. AB's licensing entitlement processes have always given me more grief than distributors. If it's any slight consolation, there are at least a few places in the world that don't have too bad.
Hacked VFD firmware makes the most sense to me. The PLC/PAC is giving a reference of xx Hz, the hacked VFD overrides the speed reference to destroy the centrifuge but reports back that everything is tickety-boo.
I mean that's cool. But sometimes it's cool to video call my wife and kids when I am away, or to use Google maps to navigate / find something in a new area, make a quick video when the kids are doing something cute, etc.
If none of these are your use case, totally cool but it does make life better for a lot of people.
>Also each school is probably on the net these days, so replace with some Wifi IOT device.
What I use are Ethernet to Bacnet gateways. Each building gets a gateway device with Bacnet nodes connected over a serial daisy chain. If the HVAC device isn't networkable, serial devices do the relay flipping. IT folks get the data into different applications.
Schools are often very challenging RF environments, my uni wifi was constantly overloaded as fuck, even the newly built engineering campus was not great. And they ran a decent amount of APs, but there was also a fuckload of people there on wifi all the time, because lol engineering campus.
Assumptions about IoT availability in terms of bluetooth/BTLE or 2.4/5GHz might be challenging for sure. Especially inside whatever HVAC metal/concrete cage etc (just run ethernet). Still though I mean it's running on a legacy UHF (?) system right now.
There are some industrial ISM bands at like 900 MHz or 432 MHz or something, and you can get modem boards that run on that. The 432 MHz aren't too fast but you just need to send "thermostat X turn on" and get a confirmation back. Which probably should be signed commands so some some yahoo can't have fun with the thermostat, even on this system, hopefully. But still, in a lot of cases probably a commodity solution would work.
